http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8256405.stm

I for one welcome our new pirate gimping overlords, and also welcome the propagators of old, tired sayings.

Already been done in Spyro. Long time ago.

The Sims 2 cut out Build Mode if you pirated that.

I daresay someone'll find a workaround. They generally do.

Well, this is just batty.

Eh? I've not heard of this?

[Edit: nm.

]

Didn't Mother 2 combat piracy by ramping up the difficulty to an absurd level? Games should do that more often.

Haha they did all kinds of fun stuff in Spyro, including randomly removing gems and eggs from the game to make it impossible to beat and randomly changing the game language.

Good read: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_01.htm



It added more random encounters.

http://starmen.net/mother2/gameinfo/antipiracy/

That was good. Oh and I never knew Spyro had a feature like that.

It seems to me this anti-piracy method misses the point.

The challenge lies in determining whether the running copy of the software is pirated or not. Not in what to do when you've discovered that it is indeed pirated.

Surely a more effective option would be to just not work at all if the software recognises that it has been pirated? Or is the intention for this to be a kind of trolling? Is it more annoying to get a bit of the way into the game before it stops working properly, or for it to refuse to start at all?

Still it's silly because pirates with half a clue will just bypass whatever detection method triggers these measures. Like they always do.

Perhaps it's just intended as a publicity stunt to scare people (who haven't thought it through or don't care much and would be easily dissuaded generally) off pirated software.

Or is it me that's missed the point? Could be, it's past my bedtime after all.

This.

Also, I think it's cool.

Red Alert 2 had a redundant copy protection built in. If it detected that you removed the safedisc protection, it would still let you play the game, but 30 seconds into the game, all your units exploded.

You missed the point. I suggest you read the Spyro crack protection article that was posted above.

Basically, they allowed the game to continue to be played for a short while so as to give the impression to crackers that they had successfully cracked the game. But then later on, when people try to play the cracked game, they realized an hour later that they couldn't beat it due to various necessary components missing.

That, and there are other layers of stuff stopping it as well, like full-out crashes, multiple checks hard coded into the game at completely random spots, checksums that check their own sums, etc. It's actually quite thorough.

The hard part wasn't really detecting that the pirates had cracked the code, but to simply make it appear as though it had been cracked at a glance. And then making it not more difficult for pirates to crack, but more time consuming. They realized that cracking was inevitable, but they were more interested in making it slow, painful work, not interesting, curious work.

I think it also comes down to determining who's a pirate and who isn't. Even if forums everywhere explain this, people will still report the game not working. It causes buzz too. It's all around win for them, and it isn't as evil as securom because it's kind of funny.

I think it's a clever move. It'll get worked around too.

It's funny till it happens in your legal copies. (Which is pretty much always what happens until they fix the accidental kick off of it)

Actually that's pretty rare overall.

I wish JK had some thing where, while you wait to face one of the 7 Dark Jedi, Rahn tells you that the game is hacked and you cannot fight.

So's you making a good post.

GTA4 has the pedal get stuck and drunk mode turn on.

rip heath ledger